Showing school outcomes in two dimensions

Challenge

Many people characterize school results as either “good” or “bad”—and reach that conclusion from two very different perspectives.

Some focus on raw performance results, such as whether test scores or graduation rates are high. But this is a poor measure of school effectiveness because it entirely ignores the student population served by the school—including whether students entered the school with low test scores, disabilities, or economic hardship.

Others focus on a school’s impact on students by seeing whether those students outperformed students with similar starting points and challenges. This sheds valuable light on school effectiveness but does not necessarily show whether students performed well enough to be positioned for success.

Both perspectives have insights to offer, but many people only focus on one.

How might we enrich the conversation by sharing both dimensions—performance and impact?

Process

Drawing design inspiration from a very different context—New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, which places cultural items along a scale of lowbrow-to-highbrow and despicable-to-brilliant—we developed a 2x2 matrix visualization showing schools’ impact and performance.

The impact dimension reflects how well the school’s students did compared to similar students, while the performance dimension reflects whether students’ results were high or low compared to citywide averages. Both dimensions reflect a variety of metrics, such as test scores, graduation rates, and course pass rates.

We prototyped the visualization, tested it with users, and added interactive features—hovering over dots to identify schools throughout the graph and downloading a spreadsheet with all the data. We conducted numerous trainings and presentations to explain the concept to administrators and educators throughout the school system.

Outcome

The Impact and Performance graph, included in our School Performance Dashboard, provides readers with a deeper understanding of the school’s results. It rejects the usual tendency to characterize school outcomes as simply “high” or “low” and reframes the discussion along two dimensions. It provides educators and administrators with valuable information about the school’s impact on students and the students’ performance outcomes. This information can inform decisions such as providing additional resources for schools with lower performance, identifying promising strategies by looking at practices of schools with high impact, or encouraging enrollment at under-the-radar schools with medium raw performance and high impact.

My Role

I designed and tested the Impact and Performance graph, managed its development, created documentation, and conducted trainings and presentations on it. I also worked with a UX analyst to develop usability tests on different ways to visualize the information.

Project Artifacts